New from Cambridge University Press!

Sociolinguistics from the Periphery "presents a fascinating book about change: shifting political, economic and cultural conditions; ephemeral, sometimes even seasonal, multilingualism; and altered imaginaries for minority and indigenous languages and their users."

Book Information

Title:

The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, Volume The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament

The first volume of the English version of this classic reference tool forBible scholars was published in 1994, and the subsequent publication of theother volumes has made it the standard modern English dictionary forBiblical Hebrew. It is based on the third edition of the Lexicon of LudwigKoehler and Walter Baumgartner, which has been widely acclaimed as the mostup-to-date complete dictionary for the Old Testament and related literature.

This complete and unabridged translation has been prepared by Richardsonwith the co-operation of an international team of Hebrew and Old Testamentscholars. Some slight modifications have been introduced to make it moreuseful to readers in the English speaking world.

The appearance of this fifth and final volume means that the completevocabulary of the Hebrew Bible, including those parts of books which arewritten in Aramaic, is now available. By extension it also includes thosevariants from the different textual traditions (Oriental, Samaritan,Septuagint, Ben Sira, Qumran, etc.), as well as parallel expressions inother ancient non-Biblical documents.

It combines scholarly thoroughness with easy accessibility, and so thedictionary meets the needs of a wide range of users. The enormous advancesthat have taken place in the field of Semitic linguistics since the days ofthe older dictionaries of Classical Hebrew are here well documented andassessed, as well as the often detailed discussions in modern Biblecommentaries of words where the meaning is particularly difficult. But thealphabetical ordering of entries rather than the traditional arrangement ofwords according to their roots maintains a user friendly face, which isparticularly helpful to the beginning student, and will also save theadvanced user much time.

Included in this last volume is an extensive bibliography to cover all thesecondary sources to which the original authors made reference. It is hopedthat this will be particularly useful, especially when used in combinationwith CD-Rom version of the Dictionary.